The billows of non-fabric thinned like cloud wisps and disappeared, and my eyes cleared, and I was looking at half a dog and a very-stretched-out T-shirt that would never fit me again. I began to notice the dusty, shut-in, windowless feel of the air that went with the cement floor. The other gruuaa who had tied themselves up in my hair untied themselves and scampered down to the floor . . . to throw themselves ecstatically into whatever the equivalent of “arms” is for gruuaa: there were a lot of them already here. I registered their presence, raised my eyes slowly up, and . . . met Val’s eyes.
Val. A small mean frightened part of me said, None of this would have happened without Val. A slightly larger but just as frightened part of me said, Yeah, that’s right. Especially the part about not dying in the park yesterday when the cobey swallowed you.
Val looked really bad in the fluorescent light. Bad and stressed. Well, duh. But there was something about the look on his face. The pro-Val part of me said, He’s worried about you. About you.
He was trying—again, I guess, helplessly, the way you can’t not try, sometimes, even when you know you can’t do something—to stand up out of the chair he was chained to. Chained. I felt like I was seeing him being tortured. Chained. We don’t chain people—that was something they did in the Middle Ages, when Charlemagne was caroming around Oldworld knocking the creepy human heads off manticores, and in Newworld the witch doctors ruled. These were big thick heavy chains—like the meanest, toughest bicycle lock you ever saw. Like too big and heavy to carry on a bicycle: your wheel rims would sag like rubber bands.
He couldn’t do it and dropped back to his seat. Clank. He must have read the expression on my face, because he said, “It’s not as bad as it looks.” He held up his hands. “It’s just to stop the mighty Oldworld magician from turning this place into a garden shed full of rusty tools, with a broken lock on the door.”
Still holding onto my dog, who had now pulled one of the knapsack strap ends under my shirt and was chewing on it, still sitting on the very uncomfortable floor of the cell where they were keeping Val chained, I said, “Which otherwise you would have done at once, of course.”
He started to smile. I don’t think he meant to. I smiled back as a way not to start crying again. I had my dog, wasn’t that enough? I tried to concentrate on Val’s shirt. Most horrors would pale in comparison, but the chains came top here.
“If we get out of this,” Val said, “which I very much fear we won’t, I am going to find someone to apprentice you to, if I have to smuggle you into Orzaskan.”
“I don’t think I’d like the big guys in Orzaskan,” I said. “Why don’t you just apprentice me yourself here?”
He was smiling now as if his face hurt. “Very well. That is what we will do. Unless we discover that Gladonya the Great has emigrated recently too.”
Gladonya the Great? No, I didn’t want to know. Maybe it was an Orzaskan joke.
“Maggie, no one should be able to do what you just did.” Another Commonwealth accent saying that. This could get boring. I wished it would get boring. Anything was better than being this frightened. “But you should not have done it.” The smile disappeared and he was completely a stern, responsible grown-up. Who happened to be chained to his chair. “There is nothing you can do here, and it is unlikely you can leave as you came.”
However it was, exactly, that we came. I looked to my left, which I thought was more or less the direction we’d arrived from, and there was a big ugly grey cement wall. I could still see some kind of maybe-cobey-like swirling running under the rough cement skin but I could also see that it was getting weaker and fainter. It would be gone completely in another minute. Leaving me here.
I looked back at Val, but he glanced over my shoulder and so finally did I. There was a gigantic silver-grey wolf—wolf—standing over what seemed to be a rather small unconscious man. As I looked, the wolf stepped delicately over the body and sat down beside him, wrapping his tail neatly around his front feet.
Wolf.
I made a little squeaking noise, rather like the noise Mongo had been making when we first arrived here. Anh. Anh. I took a deep breath and held it, like you do against hiccups, till I stopped making that noise. “Takahiro?” I said. “Takahiro?”
“I doubt he could have come through your gate in his human form,” said Val.
The wolf bowed his head, but continued watching the man. The man looked familiar. . . . I crawled a little way toward him and Takahiro. This was a complicated maneuver, involving, as it did, the knapsack I was still wearing and a large traumatized dog chewing one of its straps while in my lap with his head under my shirt. I did it on two knees, one hand, and Mongo’s butt. “Oh, gods’ engines,” I said, horribly conscious of the huge wolf who was also Takahiro, “that’s Paolo. His wife works at Jill’s mom’s hairdresser’s shop. He’s the nicest of our local Watchguard.”
And now he was unconscious on the floor of some stupid horrible military warehouse thing and Val was in the same room wearing chains. And, oh by the way, my dog was having a nervous breakdown and my new boyfriend was in his wolf shape. I could feel a bubble of either tears or hysteria rising in my throat. I scooched Mongo a little farther so I could touch Paolo’s face. I could see he was breathing.
“He fainted,” said Val behind me. “He stood up from his desk when the—doorway you made opened, and fainted. You cannot blame him,” he added as if apologetically.
I didn’t blame him. I just wished none of this had happened. Well, duh. When Paolo’s wife had brought their two little kids to the shelter to pick out a dog a couple of years ago, I’d helped them choose. I saw them out walking Goldie sometimes.
I couldn’t deal. I was a senior in high school. I’d only just passed my driver’s test this summer. I’d be eighteen next month. There was no magic in Newworld, and the army were the good guys, keeping us safe.
I had to deal.
I looked at the desk. Maybe the key to the chains was in one of the drawers?
“The key will not be in the desk,” said Val.
I turned my head to glare at him. “Don’t do that,” I said. “This is—weird—enough.”
“I’m not doing anything,” said Val mildly. “It is an obvious thing to be thinking. But I am in chains because they are afraid of my magic, and because they don’t understand it they have some poor fellow in here with me, with a panic button to press if he is able to do so before my secret miasma of evil overcomes him. They will not have left the key with him.”
“Secret miasma of evil,” I said admiringly, but I knew I was stalling. I had no idea what to do next. But whatever it was . . . “Sweetie,” I said to Mongo’s butt, “do you suppose you might be ready to come out from there?”